OLPC

Spent the day at the MI6 Conference in San Francisco, where the first big speaker of the morning was Nicholas Negroponte, who was amazing as he described his One Laptop per Child worldwide program, phenomenal, inspiring stuff.

He described how they have all these $35,000 grants that you can fund, or your group or your company, and these young Americans go into the most remote reaches of the world with solar and handcrank-powered indestructible little PCs. It's the brightest thing in the house in places where there's no electricity. The kids are learning directly, teaching their parents to read on it. They're creating their own PC hospitals where they service the machines themselves, thanks to the very inexpensive, modular design.

Negroponte wanted it to be like opening the hood of an old VW, where you could see what was wrong even if you didn't know engines. There's a display part that he said display makers never like to make removable, since it's the part that usually breaks but only costs fifty cents to make. The display makers prefer for you to buy a whole new screen. Negroponte got the design he wanted.

Each of the PCs has these "ears" that fold up, stubby colorful antenna on either side, so the software creates local wireless web networks instantly. So in these villages, if just one kid on the network has an Internet connection, every kid is on the Internet.

It's the vision of peace, that we find our tribal, pre-national connections to each other, only this is so much more sophisticated, unprecedented in human history. The biggest webs of social connectivity in human history.

Science fiction, with a billion human faces.